HEBREW PERSECUTION IN BOSTON.
By J. B. Benbow
[I SEND you an editorial, cut from the Cincinnati Weekly Enquirer of April 5, 1876, containing some very strong points on the Sabbath. J. B. BENBOW.] Not a little, and a very just, indignation is felt among the Israelites of Cincinnati, consequent upon news just received from Boston. The facts are these: A certain gentleman, Mr. E. H. Dann, has for the past eight years been engaged as a clothing merchant in that city. He was an Israelite, and a religious Israelite, conversant with and diligently practicing the laws of his forefathers and the traditions of his race. Foremost among them was the injunction to remember the Sabbath-day and to keep it holy. Mr. Dann built his faith upon the Pentateuch, and founded his observances upon its precepts. He acknowledged no other sacred book than that upon the prophecies of which the Christian religion depends. He obeyed the commands which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob enjoined, which Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Ezra proclaimed, which in the early dawn of Christianity Peter and Paul respected, and for which, as to the hebdomadal date of the day of observance, there is no direct authority for change. Genesis, if we accept the literal meaning of the book upon which both Jew and Gentile yet happily rely, still rules and still points to the seventh day, not to the first, as the twenty-four hours during which it is forbidden to man to work. All this Mr. Dann conscientiously believed, and he conducted himself in all his business in strict accordance with the principles he had learned from his cradle. But this, it seems, was not sufficient for the Pharisees of Boston. There is in that city a most ill-advised and, we believe, most unconstitutional ordinance, exacting, not a tax, but a license, for the managing within the city limits of any business. A week ago Mr. Dann’s license expired. He applied for a renewal. It was refused. He was told in plain terms that it never could be granted, because he had violated “our Lord’s day” by keeping his store open upon the Christian Sunday. After a short argument with the Superintendent, the gentleman whose privileges of honest labor were thus so suddenly obliterated appealed to Mr. Bigelow, the Republican President of the Board of Aldermen, in whose hands the final decision of the appeal rested. Mr. Bigelow attempted to quash all argument, but Mr. Dann was not to be put down. Mr. Bigelow asked him whether he was aware that he lived in a Christian land. Mr. Dann replied that heretofore he had been confident that he lived in a free land, but that now he doubted it. The upshot of the case was that the Hebrew defendant was refused his license. Can there be a more convincing proof of the fatuous bigotry and intolerance of the leading party in Massachusetts than this? History yet burns with the cruelties practiced upon the Jews in Spain a few years after Ferdinand and Isabella had taken Granada. Sir Walter Scott, for the anger of the whole world, has painted in burning words the wrongs of Isaac of York and the insults of Rebecca. Even so late as 1846 the whole history of Continental Europe teems with liberal malisons upon the restrictions of the Jews in the Ghetto. But little more than four years ago the liberal press of the whole world was aflame with passion stirred up by the story of Jewish persecution in Odessa and the Danubian Principalities. But what is the case now? Here in America—here in the virtual, if not nominal, seat of the power of the Abolitionists—the men who began the agitation for the just freedom of the colored man refuse equal liberty to the children of the Patriarchs who first rose up in armed revolt against the despotism of Eastern kings upon the banks of the Nile, of Eastern caliphs in luxurious Bagdad. And what is the race against which this Republican President of a Republican Board has so violently discriminated? They are the descendants of the men who have given us Baruch Spinoza, the father of modern philosophy, the first man who stemmed the tide of Aristotle. They are the men from whom we trace the subtile ratiocination of Maimonides and Moses Mendelssohn and the musical genius of his grandson. They are the men without whose co-operation Kant and Fichte could never have taught in Berlin. From their loins have sprung Isaac Cremieux, one of the most eloquent leaders of liberalism in France, and Benjamin Disraeli, the Premier of England. They are the men in whose history stand prominent the preachers, seers, poets and orators of antiquity, and the only nation which for ages before the advent of Jesus until now has maintained its integrity intact, its blood and generation pure. This attack in Boston upon the Jews is another evidence of the latent bigoted hatred of the Republican party against any form of outward worship or inward sentiment repugnant to their own. If these people had their own way—could they carry out their own designs—they would be more intolerant than Calvin when he burned Servetus, or the infuriated mob who sacrificed Hypatia in Alexandria to their fierce and brutal passions.